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Introduction:

The CAPHC Pain CoP works to improve health outcomes for infants and children by reducing pain experienced during medical procedures, healthcare interventions, and both acute and chronic conditions, disease or disability.

About Us

The CAPHC Pain Community of Practice (CoP) represents a group of professionals, informally bound to one another through exposure to a common class of challenges and common pursuit of solutions. We have a focus on nurturing new knowledge, stimulating innovation, sharing knowledge and quality improvement. Possible outputs could include leading practices, guidelines, knowledge repositories, technical problem and solution discussions, working papers, and strategies. The Pain CoP has chosen acute procedural pain as its first area of focus. Results of a systematic review and other research has resulted in 6 key acute procedural pain management recommendations.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the following individuals for their leadership and expertise in the development of the Tool Kits:

Evidence Summary:

"Children experience pain for multiple reasons in the healthcare setting; short painful procedures to help with diagnosis and treatment are one of the most common. Pain in children is stressful for the child, family and caregivers and effects of under-treatment can be negative and long-lasting. The experience of pain for a child is complex and is usually accompanied by anxiety, fear and behavioural changes. While research into the best management of children’s pain is improving, much work is still needed.

This overview is intended to summarize the systematic reviews of interventions studied to decrease paediatric pain that are currently available in the Cochrane Library. Given their unique physiology, research relevant to the management of newborns in the first month of life is not reviewed here. Four reviews relevant to the management of children’s pain are currently available."Several approaches can help to decrease the pain experienced by children in the hospital or clinic setting. Topical numbing creams can reduce the pain from needles for tests or treatments. Specifically, amethocaine was found to be more effective with quicker onset of effect than eutectic mixture of local anaesthetics(EMLA), although new topical anaesthetics warrant further study. Oral sucrose can help ease the pain of skin-piercing procedures for neonates and young infants. Behavioural therapies such as distraction and hypnosis are effective, inexpensive and can be used in conjunction with pharmacological analgesics with minimal resource use. Further research is required to study the additive effects of medical and psychological therapies in the treatment of children’s procedural pain, as it stands to reason that combining the therapies might confer further benefit.